Live notifications: real-time updates without opening your app

Live notifications let you push real-time, continuously updated notifications to your customers’ devices, like a delivery tracker or a countdown to an event. On iOS, they render as Live Activities on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island; on Android, they appear in the notification shade with Android 16’s Live Updates treatment.

This is a developer-forward feature, available on Premium and Enterprise plans. You build the experience in your app with our native iOS or Android SDKs, and use our API to send the activity to your server: start an activity, push updates, and end it. Customer.io manages the push tokens, so you target people by identifier; your server never talks to APNs or FCM.

• iOS: Define your activity’s data model and render it with your own SwiftUI widget. Set up live activities on iOS.
• Android: Use built-in templates for common use cases—delivery tracking, flight status, live scores, countdowns, and auction bids—or define custom types and render them yourself. Set up live updates on Android.

You can review every live notification sent to a person, including each activity’s full timeline of changes, on the Live notifications tab of their profile.